How will you handle time travel?

For me, I would never incorporate time travel into my story. The closest thing to time travel in my story is future vision and time stopping. (Even though I do have a few characters that could time travel.) I feel like it's just unnecessary baggage. BUT if I did do time travel, my characters will only travel to the future and never the past. So unless your story is based around it, I recommend not doing it. Unless you're just very knowledgeable on the subject matter.

I wanna show different types of it and how they affect reality/personal realities. I have an OC who is, will show up in a W.I.P series, the Watcher of Time and can directly affect it without causing any issues; I will show the different types through him as he has comments about mortals affecting time crudely and made analogies referencing how bad it can get and how it can never go back to the way it was even if fixed back entirely after being damaged from crude use.

Yeah and thanks ^__^.

I do have an idea for a somewhat time traveling story. It's about a guy who can see into the past but he has to be in a designated location to do it. He also can see into the future but only by 5 seconds. His limitation is that he can't see what is happening in modern times while he is doing it. I was thinking of maybe doing a detective story with him.

How will I handle time travel? I don't have any plans on writing anything involving time travel right now. Unless... you know something about my future...?

Jokes aside, I find the prospect of writing a time travel story to be intimidating because I know everyone's just going to pick apart the mechanics of how it works and it's never going to be concrete enough to satisfy those types of people. I literally know of only one time travel story that makes them happy and that's Primer, which I've never seen but only know because those types of people always say it's the only story where time travel makes sense.

Personally, as an audience member, I'm far more laissez-faire with how stories handle time travel than most nerds. I see the time travel first and foremost as a plot device for telling an interesting story, not as the author's dissertation on how time travel should actually operate. In fact, I'm pretty sure the more a writer tries to make the time travel make sense, the more likely they are to invite nerds to tell them exactly why it doesn't work. Less is more, in my opinion.

If I ever do tackle time travel, I'd probably just lean into the whole "Look, this doesn't make sense, but just go along with it, OK?" angle that the film Looper did. Bruce Willis plays future Joseph Gordon-Levitt and there's a scene where they're talking about how he traveled back in time and Willis basically says "I can sit here and chart out the full mechanics of how this works, but we don't have time for that, I'm here, let's move on" and I respect that writing choice. And it would make no sense for Willis to provide a proper explanation, he's just some (relatively) low-level goon who uses time travel for his job - he has no idea how it works and doesn't need to for his job. It would be like expecting a modern commuting worker to be able to drop everything and exposit on how the metro works.

The way I see it, if a story's time travel doesn't seem to make sense, I just chalk it up to "There are weird quirks of time travel in this universe that make some things seem to make no sense, but neither the audience nor the people in-universe know enough about it to explain why it works out that way, it just does."

I like how they handled it in ‘Steins Gate’, where it’s not the physical person but their mind that gets transferred into the past, into their younger selfs.
That’s, to me personally, the most rational way to approach time travel (at least into the past. Into the future it might be a bit trickier )

That’s being said, I would approach time travel the same. I’d send the mind if my MC into the past and essentially have a younger self of them with an adult mind and knowledge of the future. I think that could be an intriguing story without getting too tangled up with the complex (and confusing) aspects of different time lines

I think when it comes to the "science" of time travel (in regards to how paradoxes are handled, and things like that), it probably depends on the story. But I'm kind of leaning towards having the nuts-and-bolts of the time travel take more of a backstage role

For my own stories, I'm more interested in a kind of personal time travel: instead of having characters travel to another era, I find the idea of a character traveling to another point in their own lives.
some examples would be the anime The Girl Who Leaped Through Time or the anime/manga Erased. So this could be many years into their past/future or mere days.
It's worth mentioning that with this type of time travel, your current self is typically transported to your past body (if you're traveling to the past)

This approach, in my opinion, should really put unintended side effects of choices in the spotlight as things get messier and messier due to the choices.

Interesting suject.
As for a lot of SF or SF related sujects, I'm both intrigued and put off by time travel stories.
Intrigued because I find the technical difficulties, and consequences, extremely stimulating intellectually; put off because by definition there is no perfect way to explain how it would happen, and to predict what would result of it, and this may go from eye-rolling to slighlty frustrating, but never be fully satisfying.
So, I would still prefer no explaination over bad explanations.
However, the simplistic or comedic takes on time travel are not very attractive for me, so I need another way to avoid explanations.
One way could be to focus on one specific aspect of the consequences of time travel, making time travel an already understood and mundane thing for the characters. This is not discussed anymore, only the specific consequence is.
Or, a magic realism setting, where the unexplainable is either entirely embraced, or a different explanation is suggested, but not imposed, where the time travelling did not occur after all.
This being said I have crappy suspension of disbelief so it's a general issue for me, not just time travel.

I have an entire personal thesis regarding time travel and it's potential in story writing. If you're interested I'll tell you more about it, but it is quite lengthy. I'll leave a summary below:

Types of Time Travel:

Traditional - if we consider the mainstream time travel as seen in most movies or as defined by the Time Machine by HG Wells. PROs - allows experiencing different time periods (past and future). CONs - you will be burdened by explaining and resolving paradoxes (which honestly is not worth the trouble as the pay-off is most often meh).

Time Control - moving time forward and backward in small increments as seen in the game Life is Strange and the Time Stone in Marvel Comics. This is a relatively simple method of time travel with minimal damage to time-space continuum. Technically, this happens all the time (especially in physics)

Time leap- jumping forward in time. This is also a relatively simple way of time travel. It's basically the same as suspended animation, just more instantaneous. Since this does not mess with time-space consistency and merely a displacement, there won't be paradoxes.

Dimension hop - travel to the present time in an alternate timeline (think Rick and Morty and the infinite Ricks and Mortys)

Now let us combine all of the above to make a more coherent scenario on how time travel can be possible without the drawbacks.

I call this my Overly Complicated Derivatively Acceptable Time Travel Theory.

First let us postulate that time travels in a straight line and assign this along the x-axis (x,0) let us call this the origin, now consider the chaos theory and assume that each possibility (each potential random result) generates it's own timeline that runs parallel the axis. Now consider their position away from the origin (x,y), the farther away they from the origin (positive or negative), the greater the difference/deviance from the original timeline.

Second, let us consider a wave passing through these lines originating from any point along (x,0) with an amplitude=infinity. This wave represents the start of consciousness and each time the wave intersects the origin this represents a turning point in history. The area between these points is what I consider the central finite curve (from Rick and Morty) where all possible decisions will result in the same major turning point. i.e. if Germany didn't start WWII, someone else would have.

Third, consider time travel as a function of arctan originating from one timeline and terminates parallel to another.

If we consider these three assumptions, preservation of matter, and interdimensional displacement, there would be a few ways to accomplish time travel back to the past. In a perspective of one character, we can consider the transfer of consciousness. This means, you transfer your current consciousness to your past self arming yourself with knowledge of the future. An interesting point to this is that the possibility already exists with or without you travelling back in time.

Travelling to the past where you entirely do not exist is a different matter. In my theory, this would require a great amount of energy and expectedly a machine from which to draw and convert this energy. This is a must keep readers engaged, otherwise your character would just plainly be OP if they can travel forward and back by themselves with no repercussions. Individuals with this kind of ability are usually restrained by rules and are not usually meant to be the driving force in a story

TL;DR if you will consider to have time travel as a driving force in your story, make it coherent and plausible via a gimmick. A good example can be seen in Umbrella Academy, Number 5 can time travel but the way to do it is complicated, they have a gimmick where a secret organization uses special briefcases that allow time travel into the past. In your idea, where the hero is leaving behind his original galaxy/dimension is all well and good. It is justifiable in a proper space-time continuum sense. Creating duplicate galaxies however, is kind of a stretch. I mean, could you imagine how much energy would be required to do such a thing? Also, there is an issue with duplicating galaxies as they are visible via telescope and discovering that their is a galaxy identical to theirs (although is a good plot point) may be hard to explain.

Well it really depends on the story and how the characters travel in time. That would usually affect the rules also. Multiversal time travel is different from time machine time travel and so on. But if I was going to make something now I'd probably say that time is only really a construct of the mind made to organize the overload of information that we observe in the universe. So travelling in time is more along the lines of altering your mind's perspective. That's if you want to travel in your lifetime. To go into deeper history you'd have to access genetic memory in the DNA. Something more akin to Assassin's Creed. You aren't realy back in time but running a simulation of recorded history where variables may be allowed but nothing too massive. Traveling to the far future might involve universal consciousness and accessing the perspective of that to take you where you want. That would actually work both ways and would allow you the freedom to change things too. However the base idea for this is that everything has already happened in one moment and our brains are just sorting out all the information along a timescale. So you wouldn't be able to make any serious changes really.

I guess you could say my time travel is very scientific - philosophy based rather than ooh look magic device!

An excellent question!

In my universe of comics, time travel is used as a means to travel to alternate dimensions of the prime world. There are a lot of intelligent people in my universe of comics who know how to effectively navigate through dimensional hotspots, and there are a LOT of alternate universal hotspots.

Time travel stories are quite interesting. As long as someone knows why they want to tell such a story, and not use it as a deus ex machina. Like when it comes to consequences like the death of a character and resurrecting them, saying that it was in an alternate universe due to time travel only cheapens the plot. point

I don't really know where I was going with that last thought but yeah .

Some thoughts on the multiple-universe method of time travel, in which an alternate universe is created whenever somebody travels back in time (these are my own opinions and aren't meant to condemn other people's stories):

This method seems to be the default approach right now. It solves the Grandfather Paradox (when the changes you make eliminates the possibility/need of you going back in time in the first place), so why reinvent the wheel, right?
Well... It's not quite that simple. I personally hate this approach and here's why:

If you travel back into time to fix a problem, than did you really fix it or help anybody but yourself? If all you did was create an alternate universe, than the only person that benefits is yourself. Sure the people in this new alternate universe have might benefit, but they wouldn't exist if you didn't go back in time, and the original versions of themselves still have the same problems as well as your disappearance.

This doesn't completely ruin the story for me, unless the alternate universe idea is pushed to far. An episode of Stargate SG1 comes to mind, which roughly goes like this: There's a device that alerts the presence of earth in other universes to an alien menace, and the main cast had to prevent/undo it. I mean, what's the point? if there exists a universe for each possibility, than even if you save those universes, there's still the other version of those universes that don't get saved.

It just makes the whole thing so futile, as well as devaluing individuals (because there's an infinite amount of the same person). I know some people would say that the alternate universe idea is scientific, but it's not. As far as I know, it's just a hypothesis with no evidence--and with no way it can be proved.

Sometimes I can suspend my disbelief or even enjoy alternate universe stories, but I don't think I will ever use it in my own work.

I actually just wrote up an entire thing about how time travel is going to work in a future story I plan to write, so here goes:

The thing I hate most about time travel in other media is when changing something in the past destroys the timeline that the time traveler originally came from. Like, if someone time travels in that scenario, it's probably because things are so bad that the character's loved ones are probably dead/going to die soon anyway, and if not, then that's just being depressing for no reason. But if it's brought up that the original timeline is destroyed, then it's usually just so the time traveler can be angsty.

It's worth mentioning that I'm writing a comedy, not a drama.

In my story, the way time works is that every choice made, no matter how trivial, creates a branching timeline. There's no such thing as a "main" or "alpha" timeline, because there's no such thing as a wrong choice in the grand scheme of time. Alternate timelines never disappear, they just exist forever alongside every other timeline.

Time travel isn't technically scientifically possible. There are people who can see into the future, but there are limitations, such as if they don't look for a specific outcome, they only see the events that are most likely to happen, so they can't see things that are completely random, like the winning lottery numbers, things that are too far in the future and therefore have too many variables, or things that are technically scientifically impossible.

Time travel can be done, but it requires magic. There's a specific spell that works in a specific way that is used in the story. The person who casts the spell can only swap someone from their current point in time with themselves from ten years in the future. Which branch of the timeline they're brought from is chosen by ~magic~ so it's not going to be something inconvenient like the future!character was about to get squashed by a meteor so now present!character is dead in the future. To send them back to their own time, just cast the spell on them again to swap them back.

Simple, convenient, and relatively drama-free! Why does the future!character help their present!friends when they're not getting anything out of it? Uh, because they're not a dick? What happens to present!character in the future? They get to hang out with their future!friends and see all their cool future!stuff! What effect does this have on the timelines? It creates a new one, which is just a drop in the ocean really. Infinite alternate timelines, baby, what's one more?

This all makes it sound like time travel is really prevalent in the story when it only comes up like twice.

My story is actually based around (a type) time travel! (although maybe not quite the type you're referring to) What i ended up doing to avoid the hard to understand and read details that "We have to go to the past and kill your grandpa!" type stories use, I ended up going for a more groundhogs-day type time travel, where the characters are forced to relive the same month over and over again. They can't change the past, because once the month ends, they are transported back to the beginning and nothing they did in the previous month exists anymore.

So instead of the characters creating a new timeline and accidentally preventing their own birth, they are bing forced into new timelines again and again and have to figure out how to stay in one for more than a month.

Mine is a soft science approach. I have even included in the script some dialogue where it calls itself out on it, that really no one knows how the time travel works.

The time travel device simply appeared, some people were expecting it but by far most were not. Even those who were expecting it had the exact details of what to expect diluted by centuries of infighting in their own group. The group is made up of descendants of people who got stuck hundreds, even thousands of years in the past.

Some people appear with the time machine, most are groups of unfortunate people plucked from their own place in time, others personally knew the ancestors of the descendants but were not involved in time travel in a scientific way.

Because the ancestors were, for their own reasons, studying various influential people from the past the people pulled from their proper time were people who had shaped the timeline into what it is today.

It’s a story that explores people acquiring an incredibly powerful piece of technology that they don’t understand but believe they can gain from.

The general mechanics of the time travel is that when you change the past you change the future.Therefore the world of the present, which is pretty much the real world as the reader knows it, only exists as it does because these particular historical time travellers never got a chance to make their mark.

I hope to set the tone of the story so it doesn’t ever seem too sci-fi, more speculative, more drama, more fantasy. My biggest worry of the whole thing is that people will get into it expecting big scientific answers and be disappointed.

In fact the closest I get to a real explanation is the planned twist, something I foreshadow from the start which covers a topic I am more comfortable with.